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do I possess that power? Through privacy” (Fleming, 2002). The desire to simultaneously achieve “togetherness” and “privacy” is of course a conundrum faced by most nuclear families and spawned the drive towards suburban isolation – against which teenagers, seemingly much like Bond – have attempted to rebel. The conflict between longing for both “togetherness” and “privacy” is what Richard Sennett discusses in The Brutality of Modern Families (Sennett, 1970), arguing that the emphasis on privacy underpinning the nuclear family impacts negatively upon the “civilising possibilities that a metropolis uniquely offers [that] are disappearing” (Sennett, 1970). Arguably, both togetherness and privacy are more likely to be achieved, for better or for worse, within a high-density modernist housing block, than in a remote suburban retreat (Lawson, 2009). According to Udo Greinacher, Bond villains’ homes are “designed to dominate from within” (Greinacher, 2012): from the “female territory” of the interior (Havenhand, 2004). In much the same way that feminist writers have described women’s domestic status as housewives (Franck & Paxson, 1989; Gordon, 1996; Floyd, 1999) as “guardians of aesthetic values” (McLaren, 2015), Bond villain interiors are often protected by women, as most strikingly exemplified by the expulsion of Bond by Bambi and Thumper in Diamonds are Forever (1971) [Fig 12]. In addition to the conceptual conflation of women’s bodies and interiors (Gordon, 1996), the psycho-sexual symbolism of Bond’s unwelcome ‘invasion’ into the (male) villains metaphorical interior feature in queer theory analyses of the Bond Genre (Stegall and Edwards, 2009; Miller, 2001) extending his modernist longings towards contemporary definitions of metro-sexuality.
DIEGETIC DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGIES & OIKOPHOBIA Bond villains’ interiors seem generally inclined towards the fetishisation of technology. Indeed, the “technological advances and functional designs” (Greinacher, 2012) depicted in these interiors, appear to perpetuate the myth that technological progress produces household appliances that sufficiently liberate women from their domestic duties and enable them to enter the workplace (Lupton, 1993). But do they? When Bond villains’ ‘domestic appliances’ turn hostile and are even used against the villains themselves, female viewers are invited to indulge their oikophobic (an aversion to home surroundings) anxieties. For example, the villain Renard is killed by his own Plutonium reactor in The World Is Not Enough (1999); Alec Trevelyan breaks his back on his own satellite dish and is then crushed to death by a falling antenna in Goldeneye (1995) [Fig 13]; and Dr No, who boils to death in his own cooling vat (1962), tacitly conveying that any attempts to subvert modernism’s pure aesthetics with contaminating technologies comes at a deadly cost. In light of this, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier’s description of modernism as being, “the vacuum cleaning period of architecture” seems to take on new and even acerbic meaning (Jencks, 2002). Similarly, when villains attempt to subvert modernism’s constrained palette by inserting ‘natural’ elements into the minimalist interiors, decorative aquariums transmogrify into shark tanks (The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977; Thunderball, 1965)and Piranha pools (You Only Live Twice, 1967) [Fig 14], and the architecture become retaliatory. Subsequently, from an architectural history perspective, one could construe this as a resistance not only to subverted aesthetics but also to High-Tech architecture, which emerged from Modernism in the late 1960s. For the average woman viewer with domestic duties, however, these technology-infused interiors play out the dichotomy between technological terrorisation versus domestic drudgery - but from a safe distance. And whilst the majority of futuristic films fulfil their role in pre-conditioning audiences towards accepting advanced technological devices in outer space, Bond films focus on technologies that impact on the interior through diegetic